Back in 1987 when I finished delivering dustbins and got my first job in ‘computing’, it was with an international food company. We ran several of the subdivisions of that company on a Hewlett Packard 3000 centralised mini-computer. It was about 5m x 1.5m x 1m (including 2 service bays where you plugged everything in) and had a massive 8 megabytes of memory. We ran stock control, sales order processing, sales/purchase/nominal ledgers and sales-budgets on it for all those subdivisions. There was a whole separate sub-company of people to maintain and administer this thing.

The disk storage was 5 x 404 megabyte rather large disk drives (total = 2.2Gb) Each was about the size of a washing machine and vibrated more than a washing machine on full spin with a brick in it to make it wobble more. It took over 25 x 12” reel to reel tapes to back it all up

I have just upgraded Johnno’s Sony PSP to 2 gigabytes – the memory chip was the size of a small stamp.

Frightening – innit?